Continued...
Q: Isn’t the current time perfect to release skills in an “unbalanced” state to let the hive mind figure out the balance problems? As all characters are offline forever no big problem, right?
A: Yeah, it is and we do sometimes release things that we know are going to be problematic or not quite balanced. Sometimes we’ll put something out and we’ll be like, ‘this might be a little bit strong’ or ‘this might be a little weak’ or something like that. We have done that on purpose before just because, you’re right, it is a great time to make mistakes like that. We do want to get things as close to proper as we can initially and having it be in a close to proper state initially means we’ll get better feedback. If we release a skill that is completely busted OP or completely trash, we don’t get good feedback on it because there’s just not a chance for players to experience how we want it to be – if that makes any sense. We get better feedback the closer a skill is to the way we want it.
Timestamp: 53:08-55:00
Q: Any plans to nerf taunt?
A: Yep.
Timestamp: 55:04-55:05
Q: What kinds of things will LE have to make the cycles be different?
A: So there’s umm… [Mike laughs]. They may not be… [Mike laughs]. I can’t answer that properly right now. The content that gets released in them might be a little bit different, they might carry over differently, they might have more relation to previous ones, they might – so there’s an example I really like with the way Magic the Gathering used to do things more with the blocks. This may or may not be something we do – this is just me being ‘I think this is cool’ – where they’d have 3 sets released back to back and they’d all be related to each other. So it’s like a continual story that goes instead of it being just one set that stands on its’ own – which can work, Dominaria was fantastic. Quite often when there’s this storyline that happens, like the first time we went to Innistrad – these are sets in Magic the Gathering – and the storylines can be done really nicely with a little more time to be in each setting. Hypothetically, let’s say we have for like a whole year there’s three cycles and they all take place in the same era – a new era that we introduced. It’s just an example of something we could do to link them together. That’s an example of something that could happen to be different.
Timestamp: 55:08-57:08
Q: Does the game support keybind remapping? If so, are there any keys which are hard-bound?
A: The only key that is hard-bound is the left-click of your mouse. Other than that, everything else can be remapped.
Timestamp: 57:11-57:24
Q: What number of skills for each class are you guys aiming for at release?
A: It’s not 100% set in stone, but I think Spellblade has the right number right now.
Timestamp: 57:58-58:05
Q: I get asked daily what’s the overall goal for LE’s visuals? Is the plan to everything have the same quality of the Temple Of Eterra?
A: Yeah, that’s the goal for sure. Temple of Eterra I’d like to think is the new benchmark for zones – for visual quality at least. A lot of the reason Temple of Eterra looks so much better than a lot of other zones is because basically everything in it was made from scratch. That has a huge impact on it. It does take a lot longer. More and more things are going to be made from scratch. I know the next chapter is getting done that way too, I’m pretty sure. I say I know and then I’m like I don’t know if everything is, but that is the sort of style we are looking as far as quality. I do think the Temple of Eterra is our best looking zone right now.
Timestamp: 58:16-59:20
Q: Will the Summon Bear skill tree be redone? It seems a bit outdated.
A: Yup, it will be…and yup, it is [Mike laughs]. There’s a few skill trees on Primalist that are not awesome – is the best way I’d put them [Mike hovers over Summon Bear and then Summon Sabertooth as he says this]. They are less than awesome and they will be getting some pretty big reworks. There’s other that are actually pretty good, but will need some overhauls as well [Mike hovers over Werebear Form and then Spriggan Form as he says this].
Timestamp: 1:02:24-1:02:52
Q: When designing idols, how do you approach the affixes that affect a certain skill, like additional arrows for Multishot? Is there a relation between the skill ‘group’ and the size of the idol?
A: I think that – I could be wrong here – I think we try to make it as much of an even spread as much as possible. So like ones that go together – and this will make more sense and be better once the new idol slots are in because you’ll be able to use vertical and horizontal idols together a little more easily and you’ll be incentivized to do so as well.
Timestamp: 1:02:55-1:03:38
Q: What will happen to the idols we have equipped when you update the idol layout?
A: They will likely get pushed into your inventory. We may also give you a free stash tab and dump them in there. We may try to do a remove only stash tab that is temporary, or something like that.
Timestamp: 1:04:44-1:05:08
Q: Why are bows class specific and quivers are not?
A: Quivers are kind of useless without bows. I think there was some reason for that – I can’t remember what it was exactly. We treat quivers more like shields and catalysts where they’re really good for certain classes so it’s basically pointless to use them elsewhere.
Timestamp: 1:05:16-1:05:38
Q: Primalist needs a better movement skill.
A: I mean…he’s sort of big and hulking and he’s less about being agile on the battlefield and more about being beefy on the battlefield, I guess you could say. He’s probably the least agile character right now and I know you could say Mage shouldn’t really be agile, but he uses magic to do it.
Timestamp: 1:06:09-1:06:36
Q: What’s your favourite unique and why?
A: Ucenui’s Sphere because I think it’s really cool when items have really strict build requirements on them – item interdependencies on them. So because the item requires an equal amount of intelligence and attunement to cast the Water Orbs, it creates this gear puzzle where you have to constantly equip and unequip gear in order to meet the requirements, and I like that.
Timestamp: 1:06:56-1:08:54
Q: I’m pretty new to the game and trying Primalist. Is there any way to change the Werebear skill spots on the skill bar when in Werebear form? I can’t seem to work out how to do it.
A: Not yet, and I know of people will be very happy that I just said ‘yet’.
Timestamp: 1:09:32-1:09:44
Q: Will the upcoming endgame update rework existing systems or simply add a new layer to the Monolith system?
A: Ah, there’ll be some reworks in there. It does add a new layer that replaces an old layer, which I know is kind of the definition of reworking something so I guess it’s a rework. How vague can that be, right? [Mike laughs] The core essence of the Monolith is not really changing – like you’re working your way through a timeline to get to the boss at the end. That core functionality isn’t changing, but some other stuff is [Mike laughs].
Timestamp: 1:09:50-1:10:48
Q: Any plans to buff the ward and dodge defensive layers?
A: Ah, maybe. Do you want me to? Any reason? Give me a post in suggestions why you want them buffed, and in what situation.
Timestamp: 1:10:50-1:11:08
Q: I know it’s not a top priority but are you planning on adding in more cosmetic differentiations based on the trees you choose for your skills? i.e. Rive turning more purple and void-like with the void modifiers.
A: Yes. A lot of the older skills didn’t get those. For some of the newer skills there’s a lot more of those changes so we’ve overhauled how that happens within the last year, and our VFX creator has gotten so great at doing it now. It was always good, but you know how you don’t know you’re missing something until you have it? So I didn’t know we were missing it until we had the new one. It’s the same person, though he’s just gotten really, really good at it. So there’s more variations on things. There’s going to be – for Volatile Zombie – there are, I want to say, 6 or 7 different VFX changes that can happen.
Timestamp: 1:11:15-1:12:40
Q: Please don’t change the new unique that makes Earthquake on charge. It’s a lot of fun.
A: Yeah, that’s a bit of a problem right now [Mike laughs]. I will say that I find that interaction a little bit broken, personally. Actually, that’s a good example of releasing something that didn’t quite work the way we wanted it to. We knew that that was going to be a possibility, but it got a little bit crazier than we expected. It’s not – I don’t want to say it’s going away, but it’s changing a little bit. It’ll make more sense later. Don’t worry, it’ll still be fun [Mike laughs].
Timestamp: 1:12:56-1:13:42
Q: Are there plans to move power out of the passive tree and towards items, like flat damage, crit chance, etc.?
A: Ah, most flat damage comes from items. There’s a fair bit of crit chance in the passive trees. So…maybe. Do you want me to? I say me, like I’m the one who has control over it [Mike laughs].
Timestamp: 1:13:50-1:14:16
Q: Are you going to remove autocasting? Almost every top tier build includes autocasting which is not fun.
A: I agree, it’s not great. Ah, removing it I think is the wrong approach. Making the skills designed in such a way that it’s less optimal is I think a better approach. It’s very important what you said actually – most of the top builds have autocasting in their guides. Even if autocasting is a possibility in the game, if the top build guides don’t say it, it suddenly isn’t a problem. That’s not like a, ‘hey top people making the build guides, please leave that out of your build guides’. I’m not trying to say that at all because I wouldn’t expect them to change their build guides from the things that are the best. If they didn’t include those things in their build guides then someone else would and those would become the best build guides. So I think that it’s unrealistic to assume people will not just do whatever the best option they have available to them is.
I think it would be healthier for the game if we made it so that the best option available to players was not to use autocasting. It’s not easy to do as there’s a lot of upsides to autocasting. If you look at the Mage skill Flame Ward – we made some adjustments to it many patches ago – so much so that I think in most cases Flame Ward is not autocasted now because the buff when you cast it is situational enough and the cooldown is long enough that if you put it on autocast it likely gets used during a time when it’s not needed. We did put an autocast node in the Enchant Weapon tree – as a bit of an experiment. Which really only has any use if someone doesn’t know about the Num-lock trick.
I usually say that if a skill is being autocasted then that’s our fault as designers and not the ability to do it. There’s always going to be ways to do it. Even if we put a thing in to detect Num-lock, I can think of a dozen other ways off the top of my head.
Timestamp: 1:16:42-1:19:28
Q: Thoughts on sci-fi eras and classes?
A: Well in the standard timeline, if there’s no intervention from the player, there would not be any sci-fi eras unless it was an ancient civilization that was very advanced but died out or something. I’m sure that’s never been done in any games like this before [Mike laughs]. Those who know…know.
It’s possible as we have a time travel game so it means we can do a lot with the setting. It’s really hard to reconcile that this arrow I’m shooting does as much damage as this gun I’m shooting – especially if it’s a laser gun or something. I suppose you could reconcile that with magic and then apply the same magic to the guns. It’s difficult to work high technology stuff into a magical setting and have it feel good, I think. It’s not impossible and it can be done. It’s something we might explore down the road. If we’re still releasing cycles for this game in 10 years – and I hope we are – then there’s certainly room to play with the setting because of the time travel aspect, and that’s something we did consider when we were first designing how things were going to work in the game.
Timestamp: 1:19:35-1:21:10
Q: Throwing builds are hard to play early game because flat damage comes from affixes that can drop or not drop. Is it possible to make those affixes more common?
A: It is possible to make those affixes more common. It’s tricky to balance the number of affixes that are dropping. It might be easier to make them drop earlier, and possibly increase the number of bases that they can drop on. However, I don’t think we have any major plans to change it right now.
Timestamp: 1:21:14-1:21:56
Mike brings up the new map to showcase the changes that are coming:
Okay, let’s check out this map here and see what’s going on. So I know I’ve mentioned that there’s going to be some changes coming to the map panel. Here’s a prototype of what that’s going to look like, and a little sneak peak of the map from the Divine Era in Maj’elka as well. We got double leaks here – two tier leaks! If you see anything in the text please don’t read into it because I don’t know what the text says, and it was definitely put there as placeholder text. This was not made in-engine, but rather in Photoshop. Although, the one in-game does look remarkably similar to this at this point.
That was a little leak, nothing huge. I know a lot of the leaks we’ve been talking about lately have been UI things. We are working through updating the UI and so there’s a lot of concept stuff to show. It’s really easy to show that stuff.
Timestamp: 1:22:34-1:24:04
Q: Is there an experience penalty based on zone level versus your level?
A: No, I don’t think there’s any sort of penalty, but the amount of experience that low level mobs grant compared to high level mobs – it’s non-linear scaled, so the further above where you are the less naturally relevant the experience you’re getting is. If you’re level 50 in a level 25 zone then you’re getting way less than half experience.
Timestamp: 1:24:12-1:24:42
Q: Any plans to add javelins as a weapon type? Javazon from D2 is my favorite class.
A: There’s not any, I’d say, explicit plans for the current classes right now. However, there might be some opportunities to do that down the road.
Timestamp: 1:24:44-1:25:12
Q: Is there a reason why you chose a pay to play with microtransactions approach instead of FTP with microtransactions or is it purely a business decision?
A: It’s something that we talked about before we really – I guess in Kickstarter was when we were deciding that. I don’t remember the exact discussion about why we were going to do it this way. There’s a lot of things about having a box/sticker price on the game that helps. Something as simple as bots – every time a bot shows up and it gets banned they’ll have to buy the game again. So it’s disincentivizing bots to show up which I think is healthy for the game overall. Also, because there is a sticker price we can be a little less reliant on microtransactions as well. So microtransactions don’t have to be as pushed – I think is the right term for it – on the player.
We kind of just looked at all the options on how we could monetize the game and we tried to build our own model of what we thought was going to allow the most people to play the game and have fun with the game and the people who really wanted to have those super shiny things be possible and have there be an extra way for us to afford to make those super shiny things. There was a lot of things that went into it, and it’s been so many years that I don’t remember all of it. Personally, I’m pretty happy with the decision. I think it’s definitely not a model you see very often, but I hope that once the dust has settled from our game releasing and all the microtransactions are visible that it’s something that most people at least will agree is a fair model, an appropriate model, and that people are happy with it.
Timestamp: 1:25:19-1:27:24
Q: Grim Dawn did it (guns & magic), just saying…
A: Yeah, Grim Dawn did it great. It is totally doable. I don’t want anyone to assume that I meant that it wasn’t doable. The reason we didn’t start with it mostly was because we wanted to keep the theming more focused – that’s probably a good word for it.
Timestamp: 1:28:25-1:28:50
Q: Are you actively trying to differ from PoE in terms of complexity and speed?
A: Yeah, differentiating ourselves from PoE is not something that we actively try to do. Honestly, as much as possible we try to ignore the design decisions they’ve made and just try to build new things for our game – like in a vacuum as much as possible. Sometimes things come out where we’re like – every once in a while I know because some people on the team haven’t played PoE as much and a few times we’ve been in design discussion meetings and someone will be like, ‘guys I’ve got a great idea for a skill’ and they’ll pitch the skill, and someone will just open up PoE and be like, ‘that’s literally exactly this skill’. A few times we’ve had to hold back because it’s so identically exact – like they pitch the same name and everything – so sometimes we have to pull back because that’s just too the same. However, very rarely does that happen. Usually we just try to make our own game the way we want to make it.
Also, sometimes problems happen with player’s recognition of things. So maybe there’s a stat that we introduce that has the same name as a stat in PoE, but it does a different thing. Having that pre-existing language that comes with PoE is difficult to subvert in our game. So sometimes we have to make the names the same so that it is easy to understand. An example of that being when we had “protections” instead of resistances before – and this isn’t specifically because of PoE. This is all the way back and I’m not sure which game started it – the first one I played it with was Diablo. Having that resistances language is a lot easier for most players to understand because they already know from Diablo or PoE what that language means.
Timestamp: 1:30:41-1:33:15
Q: Will the new map layout help tell us if we’ve done all the passive point quests?
A: I have heard that request a few times. It’s tough to give that information because it kind of spoils what’s coming – if that makes any sense. I think we’ve talked about putting an NPC somewhere that you can talk to that says it or possibly in the UI…it’s a little unclear. We do have more specific – a little bit more information so that change should help with that.
Timestamp: 133:20-1:33:51
Q: Thoughts on races/gauntlets/and other fun “competitive community” events? Is that something post launch you guys think you might be starting yourself or leave it up to the community?
A: I know people in the community are already doing this, and we’ve already run two race events ourselves that were both wildly successful. Yeah, that is definitely something we’ll be looking at doing more of down the road. We have lots of great community members who already run events like that and probably have great insight into the do’s and don’ts, and probably have features that they’d request us implement to make those easier. I know they have, and we’ve tried to accommodate them as best we can. At times certain things we’re possible. Sorry guys [Mike laughs]. I’m sure most of you are probably listening or will probably listen to this at some point.
Yeah, I love those events. I think they’re very cool. Having those short burst events are really cool because it gives people an opportunity who maybe like to play several different games and don’t want the long-term competitive nature of the 3 month cycle or something like that, but still want to compete in something. So having those like, ‘okay this is going to be a 1 month league or gauntlet or race’ or whatever you want to call it or even a one day event even offers a lot of great potential there.
Timestamp: 1:33:56-1:35:21
Q: Will you have events and post launch contests?
A: Yeah, that’s basically the same question I just answered. Yes, there will be things like that. We have been building our ladder system basically to accommodate things like that from day 1.
Timestamp: 1:35:26-1:35:42
Q: A quality of life request, please allow players to change the audio device in-game. As it is now, I have to exit the game to do so.
A: Yeah, I know. Sorry, I’m so sorry [Mike laughs]. I’m working on it. We have heard you loud and clear, and also the game loud and clear even when Alt+Tabbed.
Timestamp: 1:36:16-1:36:33
Q: Just 1 question sir, sadly my computer can’t run Last Epoch, will it be on GeForce Now soon?
A: Yeah, we are working on it. It is looking really good. I’ve had this question a few times. I can’t give you an exact yes/no or concrete date of when GeForce Now will or will not happen. It’s looking very good for it to happen. We are still working on it. Information on that will be available later.
Timestamp: 1:36:56-1:37:23
Q: Can the Beastmaster get more melee skills, maybe its own type of spin to win?
A: I know that there is one more melee skill for sure coming to Beastmaster or Primalist. It is not a spin to win – I’ll tell you that much, but it’s pretty sweet.
Timestamp: 1:37:30-1:37:54
Q: Is dual wielding shields something you would be open to allowing?
A: Ah, maybe. There’s some pretty wonky issues that arise with dual wielding shields. Balancing it is quite tough. It’s not out of the question…so maybe.
Timestamp: 1:38:02-1:38:18
Mike displays an early design mock-up for the future Character Sheet:
I’ve got a very early…very, very early preview. This preview was built in about 20 minutes, but we really like it and the UI designers are going to hate me for even showing it. So it’s probably going to be pretty close to what we’re going to do. This is a mock-up for a new style of character sheet. This is going to be redistributing the things on the screen and hopefully making them a little bit more clear what’s grouped with what, and then breaking off the details into a separate panel that pops out. As you can see, there happens to be 5 hexagons on the right there in that panel – I don’t know what that means but you know, there’s a few of them there. [Mike has hinted before that the new character sheet will show more detailed information specific to your specialized skills, so one can assume that those 5 hexagons are your 5 skills that you can see more detailed stats for by clicking on them.]
Timestamp: 1:46:20-1:47:35
Q: When is stun getting nerfed?
A: You mean like you stunning things or things stunning you? Because right now neither are getting nerfed, but maybe…maybe someday.
Timestamp: 1:47:37-1:47:50
Q: Follow-up Question: Things stunning me, of course.
A: [Mike laughs] I thought that’s what you meant, but just making sure. We’ve been adding new tools to avoid stuns on you. Like endurance, for instance, is a new tool for that. It’s not necessarily a perfect tool for that because you can’t have it at the very top.
Timestamp: 1:49:15-1:49:40
Q: Can you buff block? It seems a bit weak right now.
A: Ah, maybe. I don’t think it’s that terrible. Investing heavily in block as a class that typically does well with it is really good still.
Timestamp: 1:50:20-1:50:34
Q: Any plans to update the Monolith completion area? It sucks having to portal to the End of Time for respec or gambling.
A: I think that it’s possible we might – nah, I don’t think either of those things will get added into there. They might, they might. I think it’s unlikely that they’ll get added specifically because we want to disincentivize respec’ing mid Monolith run, and gambling is overvalued as it is. If you’ve noticed we’ve been making it harder and harder to gamble, and worse and worse to gamble. That’s very intentional.
Timestamp: 1:50:50-1:51:40
Q: When will multiplayer be in the game?
A: Soon…thoon. [Mike probably just gets tired of saying it, but it’ll arrive when it’s ready.]
Timestamp: 1:52:50-1:52:52